D&D 5E Storm King's Thunder is someone's Demonweb Pits

[Stormonu]

Unless you ran the single volume anniversary edition of Rise of the Runelords? That version was for Pathfinder; the original 6 book version is 3.5.

How did grappling work? Did you read the CMB off the Pathfinder stat blocks, or did you ask everyone to amuse themselves for five minutes while you calculated it manually from the 3.5 stat block?

Granted, it’s been somewhere around 15 years, but I don’t remember grappling showing up much, if at all. Certainly, not anything in a way that slowed the game down to a crawl in a memorable way.

And if you want to complain about grappling, look at he rules in 1E for grappling and overbearing- that’s 20 mins of calculations in itself by RAW. As a DM, I’m not going to spend over 30 seconds “calculating” anything for a creature’s attack, and the player better have it figured out by the time it’s their turn.

 

[dave2008]

What would be a classic from the 2nd and 4th edition eras?

For 4e I have heard good things about Madness at Gardmore Abbey

 

[el-remmen]

I've never read a module past the 1E/BECMI era (i.e. 2E and beyond) that I have liked as much as those modules (or DUNGEON mag adventures from both the 1E and 2E eras - which are what I really love).

That said, I do agree that the older modules need a bunch of re-working to make sense in an ongoing campaign or be in line with new rules - but I always feel like if I am gonna have to adapt the adventure anyway (which I would do no matter when it was from) I'd rather adapt the capacious modules from the old days with lots of room for sticking things in, moving things around, or taking things out.

I will say that just yesterday, I was thinking that if I ever started a D&D youtube channel my first video would be about constructing location-based adventures using pre-existing material - but using the example of how I connected a classic 1E module (one of my faves N1 - Against the Cult of the Reptile God) with some Dungeon adventures and homebrewed stuff to create a kind of "bounded sandbox" with different narrative threads, not all of which are related (except by general vicinity)

 

[el-remmen]

Except ToA is a whole campaign with a big story. ToH was a goofy one shot tournament module never inded to be a serious part of your campaign.

I know someone running it for their group in an ongoing campaign right now! (though I have no idea how much it has been changed for this).

 

[Reynard]

I know someone running it for their group in an ongoing campaign right now! (though I have no idea how much it has been changed for this).

If run by the book it is likely to be a campaign ender.

 

[el-remmen]

If run by the book it is likely to be a campaign ender.

For sure. But I doubt it is.

 

[amethal]

Granted, it’s been somewhere around 15 years, but I don’t remember grappling showing up much, if at all. Certainly, not anything in a way that slowed the game down to a crawl in a memorable way.

And if you want to complain about grappling, look at he rules in 1E for grappling and overbearing- that’s 20 mins of calculations in itself by RAW. As a DM, I’m not going to spend over 30 seconds “calculating” anything for a creature’s attack, and the player better have it figured out by the time it’s their turn.

Maybe you are misunderstanding me, or I'm misunderstanding you. I'm not complaining about grappling.

If a monster wants to grapple someone in Pathfinder, you are going to need its CMB. A 3.5 stat block won't give it to you so if you are running a 3.5 adventure in Pathfinder you'll have to work it out (or not use grappling at all). It was the biggest headache I found converting Legacy of Fire into Pathfinder on the fly, but it wasn't a big enough problem to require me to prepare it in advance.

 

[Quartz]

This is going to sound heretical, but a lot of those old modules are actually pretty badly designed, and only have gained a “classic” standing because they were the only things available at the time.

Speaking specifically of the GDQ modules, they required a lot more work than modern modules.

 

[Umbran]

I think maybe less that 20 years. When did the first successful adventure path appear? 2005? 2006?

The market research said that, in 1999, the typical campaign ran 12 to 18 months. Period. The multi-year long campaign was already a minority thing in 1999.

This was before 3e was published, and before adventure paths were a big thing.

Rather than assuming adventure paths caused this pattern, we should recognize that the Adventure Path format is a reaction to this pattern. Given that was how long a group ran, 3e was designed to allow one to go through at least a healthy part of the character level progression in that same time. It then made sense to offer a packaged adventure or series of adventures to cover that span.

You keep referring to "new gamers" - I am trying to point out that this was already the established pattern two decades and more ago. It is not "new gamers" only.

 

[Democratus]

It is probably a better metric to measure how many sessions a game lasts, rather than how many years.

Back in the day we ran two sessions a week, minimum, and would go for 3-6 months.

These days, we run twice a month if we are lucky and our campaigns tend to last about 3 years.